CYBORG BUGS REVISITED

Remember the HI-MEMS project I almost got involved with a year and a half ago? It's back, with a wirelessly controlled beetle. According to Technology Review, University of California at Berkeley researchers Michael Maharbiz and his colleagues have "developed a tiny rig that receives control signals from a nearby computer. Electrical signals delivered via the electrodes command the insect to take off, turn left or right, or hover in midflight. The research, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), could one day be used for surveillance purposes or for search-and-rescue missions."

I can't claim any credit but as a science fiction writer I'm allowed to be delighted when one of my concepts comes true twenty years later. If you've read Sparrowhawk, you know what I mean. (For a new copy, click here.)

WEIRD SCIENCE

I've just finished reading Gregory L. Reece, Weird Science and Bizarre Beliefs: Mysterious Creatures, Lost Worlds and Amazing Inventions, I. B. Tauris (distributed by Palgrave Macmillan), $18.95, 238 pp. (ISBN: 978-1-84511-756-6).

Reece has dug up everything he can find on Bigfoot, Nessy, Atlantis and Mu, Hollow Earth, chupacabras, channeling aliens on Venus, the Shaver mystery, free energy, and a great deal more. He has attended conventions where folks who believe in this stuff--or who at least say they do--gather. And he has pulled it together in a unique "celebration" of intellectual diversity, illustrated with stills from sci-fi movies and the like. It all "reminds us that what counts as evidence differs from context to context. Likewise, what is real."

I think he's just being polite. He recognizes that mainstream intellectuals think this stuff is pure bunkum. There are a few "maybes" out there, perhaps, but most of what he parades for our delectation and astonishment is so far beyond what the facts support that even Hollywood can't touch it with a straight face.

You, of course, don't need to keep a straight face while reading the book. In fact, you probably can't for there is humor here, albeit the thoroughly out-of-fashion humor of the carnival freak-show.

Yeah, I'm not as polite as Reece is.